I’ve spent an ungodly amount of money on groceries this past month. Without going into too much detail, I finally went to a gastroenterologist last month to talk about some of the heartburn issues I’ve had for a long time, which got much worse this past year, and when she explained to me some of the serious conditions that can result from chronic heartburn, I decided it was time to make some major lifestyle changes, otherwise there’s actually a decent chance these issues will progress and eventually kill me. Surprise.
I bought a book that she recommended, and the next day, I probably threw out a third of my food.
Now, I want to focus this post on the cost of healthy foods, but I can only explain my process through the specific steps I’ve taken to resolve my own health issues, so bear with me.
First of all, a lot of foods give me heartburn, especially several key ingredients that are in almost everything. My saving grace has been the fact that there are definitely foods that DON’T give me heartburn, so it has been a huge process to narrow those foods down to a far more specific list than I have ever discovered. Two key strategies that I’ve had to follow are to 1) eliminate highly processed ingredients and 2) replace these with simple, healthy ingredients. This has been incredibly challenging. But the interesting thing is that this has taught me a whole lot about how deceptive and/or terrible most grocery store foods are.
But it’s not just enough to understand which foods do and don’t give me heartburn. It’s important to learn what caused the damage in the first place, and I think this is where it’s important to realize that I am definitely not alone, and the number of people who share my problems is not trivial. This strongly implicates the nature of the foods we are ingesting.
Now, I could try to talk about all of those foods in this post, but I’m not an expert on this and there are far better sources for learning about them. But since the modern diet probably has something to do with my heartburn, it’s important to look at what the modern diet is, and I have a few thoughts on this.
The vast majority of food in our grocery stores consists of at least one of the following: milk, cheese, sugar (and its variants), tomatoes, corn, white flour, onions, garlic, and seed oils. If, for whatever reason, any one of those foods doesn’t agree with your body, your options for food often dramatically decrease. And when half of them are heartburn triggers, you are royally hosed. I would know.
In fact, pay special attention to the seed oils. It is absolutely unbelievable how many foods they are in.
I’m going to cover a handful of topics about how all of this relates to price and affording healthier foods. Rant warning!
- Asian Sauces
- Onion and/or garlic are in almost every type of Asian sauce you can imagine, and corn starch is almost as prevalent. When I realized that onion and garlic are common heartburn triggers, I decided to throw out anything I had that included either of them, which – surprise – had me throwing all of my Asian sauces out except fish sauce and soy sauce [Okay, I did keep some ketchup, too, which I really should ditch at least in the short-term]. At this point, I honestly don’t know what a good alternative is. The fact that most of these sauces use caramel coloring and lots of sugar would almost suggest to me that that they were never very healthy in the first place, but you can find fish sauce for cheap (very simple ingredients), certain kinds of relatively-common soy sauce, and Bragg (the brand) Aminos for pretty cheap, too.
- Flour
- Carbohydrates like bread get a bad rap. I don’t think this is necessarily fair, though, since most of the breads that are consumed are the highly processed white carbohydrates, which gives quality complex carbohydrates a bad name. The refined carbohydrates have most of their nutritional value stripped away, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that these play a big role in insulin resistance and obesity. Whole wheat flour is not especially more expensive to buy, but it is definitely harder to find. I would estimate that for every 5 or 6 rows of white flour (“bread” flour and “all-purpose” flour) on the shelves, there is only 1 row of whole wheat, and this should disturb you.
- Flour is really tricky, and the industry likes to try to deceive you. If I’m looking for wheat bread, I always look at the fiber content on the label to tell if it’s the real deal, and a low fiber content is a dead giveaway that you are dealing with white bread or well-processed wheat bread. To be fair, white bread is delicious, but when I make a loaf at home, I almost always cut the flour at least 1 part whole wheat when I otherwise use 2 parts white. The best part about making your own bread is that you can avoid all the other ingredients. My loafs are made of flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast. That’s it.
- It’s difficult to find wheat hamburger buns, and when you do it’s difficult to find any that don’t contain molasses. I suspect companies use molasses as a sweetener in their wheat bread because it gives a darker color and is more likely to deceive people who associate the darker color of wheat bread with it being healthy (even when the fiber content is still stupid low). And you can probably guess why I don’t like molasses.
- Sugar
- There is an awful lot of information that has come out over the past 10 years about just how bad sugar is for you, but half of the entire food industry incorporates sugar into its products, so there are powerful incentives to ignore this. Some people say that things like stevia are healthier for you, and while this may or may not be true, I’m skeptical whether anything so refined and sweet is actually good for your body. Again, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I find it hard to believe that ingesting huge quantities of one sweet chemical would be very bad for you while ingesting huge quantities of another sweet chemical would be perfectly fine. Besides, I realized that the #1 ingredient in the little container of “stevia” I bought years ago was actually erythritol, so I threw it out. I fucking hate people.
- Oats
- Oats are kind of bland, but they do have a little bit of flavor, and I like that they are chewy. Strangely enough, granola is really just oats mixed with other ingredients and a binding agent like rice syrup. Popular “healthy” brands sell oats at a grossly inflated price, though, and presumably you want to get the organic kind, which is probably a better use of your money, but I’ll talk about later. (For all you know, the “premium” brand of non-organic oats could be the exact same thing as your standard box of quaker, so why pay double?)
- Baking Powder
- Almost all baking powder has corn starch in it. But why? Who the heck came up with that? I found one odd brand that uses potato starch instead, so I will probably use that going forward, but I still need to try it out. It’s probably not a big deal for most people, though.
- Cheese
- Supposedly-healthier cheeses are very expensive, especially if you want cheese produced from grass-fed cows. Probably what you want to avoid most are pre-shredded cheeses, which use several extra odd ingredients to prevent caking. To be fair, I’ve never accorded too much importance to this, as I used to buy those when necessary, but I want to hedge my bets with this heartburn stuff. It isn’t too difficult to buy a block of cheese and use a cheese grater. More disturbing for me is that fact that a regional big-name grocery chain, whose in-house cheese brand is at least 50% of the cheese they sell, conspicuously substituted “annatto color” for “color”. I don’t know all the FDA rules for what you can or cannot say on a label, but this actually leads me to believe they removed annatto – already a slightly controversial ingredient – and replaced it with an orange-colored chemical, and even then, the cheese isn’t any cheaper. Gross.
- (To be fair, though, anything with a high fat content hasn’t been too nice to me, so this is likely something I will want to significantly limit until the healing progresses)
- BBQ Sauce
- I’m not going to swear off BBQ sauce entirely, but I had a sauce last year that I realized was 50% added sugar per weight in grams. That is absolutely insane. I still like BBQ’d meat, and will probably indulge in the sauce every great now and then, but I’m probably going to reserve it as a special treat. I don’t own any BBQ sauce right now, and I’m unlikely to own any in the future. Most of the other ingredients are garbage, too. So yeah, if you thought ketchup was bad at 4 grams of added sugar per tablespoon, that BBQ sauce was 13 grams, just for perspective.
- Dietary Acid
- If you look closely at the ingredients in many foods, you’ll notice that many often have some form of acid in them, often ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and a few others. This is usually done to prevent bacterial growth, and I don’t think it’s the devil. But this is one of the things my book on heartburn talks about: dietary acid is everywhere. The theory is that this chronically contributes to highly-acidic meals, which mess with pepsin in the stomach and anywhere pepsin can find itself (due to other things), such as the esophagi of people who suffer from chronic heartburn. Whether this is true or not is a good question, but a more natural diet would almost certainly be lower in overall acid consumption, and that’s worth paying attention to in a world in which heartburn is thought to be normal when it’s not. Of course, this means that fresh foods are often better than foods preserved with acidic ingredients, and that sometimes increases the cost.
- Chicken Nuggets
- Awww yeah, gotta love those chicken nuggets. In order to escape the constant use of garbage oils used in almost all breaded, frozen foods, I finally found some at Whole Foods that DON’T USE CORNSTARCH and are fried in “expeller pressed” soybean oil ONLY. The problem, of course, is that “expeller pressed” doesn’t make the oil healthy. But again, I don’t think seed oils are the devil, it’s just that they are in almost everything we eat so we are probably grossly overconsuming them. Stuff like organic chicken nuggets, though, is really just a weak attempt to make a healthy version of something that isn’t very healthy in the first place, and they are significantly more expensive this way. When people say that eating healthier is outrageously expensive, I think they are often referring to things like this. I don’t think that eating healthy has to be terribly expensive, but it will be if you insist on feeding your family with this sort of thing. Nonetheless, they actually agree fairly well with my body, so it’s incredibly nice to take a break and enjoy some old foods, but I definitely don’t want to pay $17 for a weekly bag of these (although that’s still cheaper than eating fast food 3 times a week, to be fair).
- Hamburgers
- Hamburgers have a bad rap going back to the lie from the 1970s that fats are responsible for obesity and heart disease, though I have no doubt you can still overdo it. However, while steak is usually fine for me to eat, I’ve noticed that hamburgers have started giving me problems, and I don’t quite know why. I think it has more to do with the fact that hamburgers are usually paired with white flour buns, which often have a ton of chemicals in them, and cheese slices, which also often have a ton of chemicals in them. I don’t think paying extra for grass-fed beef is necessarily the best thing, as it usually costs twice as much, but I could totally be wrong – I get that grass-fed cows have a higher omega-3 presence in their meat, or something like that, but I’m almost convinced that buying a large steak and cutting it in half to make two meals is the better deal. If you substitute the cost of buns and cheese, it honestly might roughly even out or only be a little more expensive. I had the strange epiphany the other day that my homemade burgers are not actually that great, at least not compared to homemade steak. Eat your large-ish half steak with a side of broccoli and you’ll likely be pretty full at the end.
- Elk
- Elk is advertised as a healthier alternative to beef. Mind you, it’s fat content is probably much closer to the meat that that OG humans ate – lean and gamey – but it’s a lot harder to raise elk for slaughter than it is cows. What bothers me most, though, is that I simply can’t find it in stores without a certain percentage of beef in it. Why? That’s super shady to me – what do they mean 3%? – 3% by weight, or 3% of carbohydrates, some sort of otherwise-impossible, legal-but-ethically-questionable technicality that allows them to use 25% beef by weight or something like that? Why can’t you find elk with no beef at all? It tastes exactly like beef and gives me the exact same problems as hamburger (although, again, maybe that’s more related to the buns) but only costs as much as 1 pound of grass-fed beef, which is why I feel like calling bullshit – there’s no way you can raise elk at that low of a price. Somethings not right there, I just don’t quite know what. I think hunters have the advantage here, I’d save my money for something else.
- Milk
- I don’t have anything against milk, but there seems to be a lot of evidence that the milk industry did everything it could to make itself a staple in the American diet. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding it. I’d drink it if it didn’t give me so many problems. That being said, when I started drinking almond milk recently, it was only as a way to consume smoothies that were friendly to my body. I learned that a lot of almond milks have strange chemicals in them, so I switched to an almond milk that doesn’t use any oils. No, seriously, my previous brand had sunflower oil in it. WTF? Almond milk works very well with my body, but I would otherwise totally be fine with a higher quality of cow’s milk. Maybe once I’ve recovered I can return to it in small quantities. Problem is, most common milk is very cheap, and so it’s very easy to keep it an American staple, which it maybe doesn’t quite deserve. Just because it’s cheap, doesn’t mean it’s good.
- Oils
- It’s kind of cool to me that we can extract the oils from so many plants, but when it’s an extremely difficult process, it often requires a ton of chemicals and procedures to do so, making you wonder what you’re really getting from the endeavor, and why you’re making the endeavor in the first place. It sounds like a lot of these oils are made from the byproducts of industrial food waste. I think that was the story behind crisco, and people probably expanded on that idea. Some people claim that seed oils are inflammatory, and again, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s insane to me that once upon a time, beef tallow, lard, and butter were the primary cooking fats in European America, but now the oils in stores occupy shelves and shelves full of various seed oils. You might be lucky to see some lard, but I’ve only ever found beef tallow at health food stores. That’s not to say tallow, butter, and lard are wonderful (I simply don’t know if they are healthy or not), but it’s scary that these seed oils became a dietary staple so recently in human history but occupy an absolutely disproportionate role in our diets. Could they have something to do with the diseases of our modern world, which were virtually unheard of hundreds of years ago? I’m going to stick with olive oil with some occasional vegetable (soybean only) oil. (My roommate has some coconut and avocado oil, too, which I’ve heard good things about).
- Organic foods
- I have mixed feelings about organic food, especially organic produce. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that it exists – it’s almost certainly good that it’s an option – but I do sometimes think that it’s over-hyped. If you go from eating junk food to fruits and vegetables, I think the ROI is incredibly high. But the move from non-organic produce to organic produce I don’t think is nearly as impressive. I don’t believe people are getting cancer from their non-organic broccoli – but I do think they are getting diabetes from sugar-packed foods that they eat as a substitute for fruits and vegetables in the first place.
- That being said, I get that some foods are sprayed with more pesticides than others – especially the so-called “dirty dozen”, and considering the dangers of these pesticides and the fact that they are extremely recent inventions used on almost everything we grow, it leads me to wonder if they are part of the health problems we are seeing in the modern world. To some extent, having enough food with some sickness is better than not having enough food with a whole lot of death, so we’re clearly talking about tradeoffs from the existential perspective in a world with 8 billion people in it [I’ve read Malthus, too!], but I don’t think non-organic produce dooms you to an early death, at least not in most cases. Again, heart disease is a way bigger concern in my opinion (and actually, if fewer crops were grown for garbage foods, we could much more easily use that land for growing organic produce, but whatever)
- Personally, for me, though, with my issues, I realized it might be valuable to do what I can to hasten the healing process I need to experience, so I decided to start buying organic flour and organic oats specifically to better avoid glyphosate, which is supposedly used quite liberally on wheat, oats, and some other plants. I’m less concerned about fruits with thick skin, like bananas. There were times last year when I was spending $75 every month on trips to the convenience store, and I’m not saying “never treat yourself”, but I am saying that when I complain about paying an extra dollar for a pound of organic broccoli ($3 instead of $2) I have to remember that I once paid $3.50-$4.30 almost every day of the week on a breakfast energy drink that was terrible for me. I’ve managed to break that addiction, but I still have some minis during the week and treated myself to a full can today. From that perspective, well…paying a little extra for organic produce is the least of your worries.
This all being said, I’ve lost like 7 or 8 pounds this past month, probably from the crazy reduction in sugar. I don’t even know what to say to that except that I totally believe that sugar is, borderline, the devil, and these people talking about it being a primary cause in the obesity epidemic are probably correct.
As for all the money I spent? Well…I’m kind of loaded up on food right now. I have so many things I won’t need to buy for the next month, it’s crazy. But I’ve had to do a lot of trial and error, too. Will I eat this, or will it go bad well before I think about it? Do I like this? Does this agree with my body? So yes, it’s been very expensive, but A) your money doesn’t do you any good if you’re dead, and B) I’m slowly figuring out my groove, and I think once that happens I can stick more rigidly to the foods I actually want and will eat, and I think that will help me spend within a very reasonable limit. It could even be cheaper if I 100% ditch sugar treats, which are honestly probably far more expensive than healthier food. Trying out these new foods is expensive, and you really just have to accept that for what it is.
I will end this very long rant with a quote from a favorite blog of mine: “Any business transaction predicated on a lie, no matter how trivial, will inevitable go downhill from there”. Do not trust companies that consistently lie to you or attempt to deceive you, especially with something as important as the food you put in your body.